NEoN Knights

Hear ye, hear ye..!

SuperFly is primarily about producing creative events in unusual spaces and NEoN Knights 2010 (NKX), a QR treasure hunt that took place during NEoN (Dundee’s Digital Arts festival) in November 2010, was no exception. It was a collaboration between Jon Gill (SuperFly – game design and illustration), Rick Curran (NEoN Knights web application) and Tim Pryde (game design).
The aim was to produce a fun and immersive game using traditional media (in this case: street posters) and giving it a leg up with elements of new media (in this case: QR reading devices) and encouraging the audience to follow the action via our leader board.

So, how do you play..?Each of the NEoN delegate bags contained a flyer with the basic instructions and a QR code to get the ‘bravest’ attendees started on their quest. Once scanned and logged in no further intervention was required.. you just got scanning! The flyer pointed you to a google map of QR locations around the City of Dundee – The further from festival centre you wandered the higher the value of the QR code.

With an XBox360 up for grabs we had allowed for a week of players dipping in and out of the game as and when the conference would allow.
In addition to the street posters several ‘wild card’ QR codes were introduced throughout the week around the festival campus.
As well as gaining points towards winning the XBox several of the QRs contained voucher codes for deals on food, drinks and clothes. Several local businesses joined in with offers for the codes (The Playwright), free posters and tshirts (TayPrint) and Street Advertsing Services took care of the poster sites, plus the Arts centre (DCA) had staff wearing super-high-scoring t-shirts with codes on them!

Thanks to NEoN10,Blonde Digital (Edinburgh), Tayprint (Dundee) and the Hannah Maclure Centre (Dundee) for supporting the game and to Rick and Tim for completing NEoN Knights templar. Knights be Brave!

Blog posts related to the event:
Tim’s blog post on NEoN Knights ‘as it happened‘ via the medium of Twitter.